Quotes By Bertrand Russell

The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice.

To teach how to live without certainty and yet without being paralysed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it.

The most savage controversies are about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.

Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.

Drunkenness is temporary suicide.

Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted.

I believe in using words, not fists. I believe in my outrage knowing people are living in boxes on the street. I believe in honesty. I believe in a good time. I believe in good food. I believe in sex.

Boredom is... a vital problem for the moralist, since half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.

Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.

I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.

Contempt for happiness is usually contempt for other people's happiness, and is an elegant disguise for hatred of the human race.

The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.

Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.

Order, unity, and continuity are human inventions, just as truly as catalogues and encyclopedias.

A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known.

The megalomaniac differs from the narcissist by the fact that he wishes to be powerful rather than charming, and seeks to be feared rather than loved. To this type belong many lunatics and most of the great men of history.

I do not pretend to start with precise questions. I do not think you can start with anything precise. You have to achieve such precision as you can, as you go along.

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.

It seems to be the fate of idealists to obtain what they have struggled for in a form which destroys their ideals.

Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.

Liberty is the right to do what I like; license, the right to do what you like.

Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.

With the introduction of agriculture mankind entered upon a long period of meanness, misery, and madness, from which they are only now being freed by the beneficent operation of the machine.

The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.

The degree of one's emotions varies inversely with one's knowledge of the facts.

Every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and justification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical.

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.

None but a coward dares to boast that he has never known fear.